The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  In the early evening, sitting in the sunshine outside the Times plant smoking a cigarette, I found myself, for the first time I could remember, actually excited. Exhaling smoke straight into the still June air, my neck stretched taut, my eyes closed against the dazzling light of the low sun, for the first time I allowed myself to assemble the pieces of the story I had fallen into. It made the original assignment—a complex, ambiguous story about a fugitive from a twenty-two-year-old crime—look insignificant. Jim Grant, Senator Montgomery, Julia Montgomery—an ex-U.S. senator protecting his drug-addled daughter, using dirty pool to take custody of his granddaughter from her rightful father…It was a big, sexy story, just right to send Ben Schulberg, boy reporter, zipping down the Thruway to the New York Times. And in New York, I knew, everything would suddenly become better: my health, my sleep, my gym attendance, my lack of girlfriend. Hell, I could even escape cleaning my refrigerator.

  As I often did, in order to keep smoking, I walked over to my car and, engine running so I could get juice from the cigarette lighter—I never remembered to charge the battery—used the cell phone to call, in turn, directory assistance, Jim Grant’s home, directory assistance, Jim Grant’s office, and finally, using the number that Jim Grant’s assistant gave me, Jim Grant’s cell phone, which was answered by, of all people, you, Izzy, who finally agreed to find your father. It sounded as if you were outside somewhere, perhaps on a farm, because I could swear I heard goats bleating. Here, when your father finally came on the telephone, I asked him.

  “Mr. Grant. You didn’t mention to me you were going to court with your wife over your daughter’s custody.”

  “Ben?” Your father’s voice paused.

  “Yes?”

  “When are you going to stop calling me Mr. Grant?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be. It’s a fucking outrage.”

  “Mr…. Jim. Surely it’s not that important?”

  “Yes, it is. I deliberately asked you not to call me Mr. Grant. It’s rude.”

  “I apologize.”

  “Now, what the hell business are my marriage and daughter of yours?”

  I paused, reminding myself that I was being manipulated; reminding myself that I was, as a reporter, de facto my subject’s enemy.

  “So, how’d she get as far as filing suit?”

  “What’s that mean, Benny? She hired a lawyer, he filed papers—not a lot of mystery there.”

  “No, I mean, why aren’t you taking her to the cleaners? It’s a no-brainer, her record of drug addiction and abuse.”

  Now he was actually silent for a few seconds, and when he answered, I actually felt bad. “How do you know about that?”

  “It’s my job, Mr.—Jim.”

  “Well, I have no comment on that.”

  Now I didn’t feel bad anymore. “No? How about this, then: you think your custody battle has nothing to do with the fact that I got an anonymous tip about Sharon Solarz?”

  “And why should it?” He knew the answer, of course. What he wanted was to see if I knew it too.

  “Your father-in-law is a former U.S. senator, Jim. He has a lot of clout in Albany.”

  “So?”

  Just to show him I understood, I said patiently, “So, if I were Julia Montgomery, and I were taking you to court for custody of my daughter, and you knew that I was incompetent for reason of drug addiction, well…getting Daddy and his lawyers to tie you to a cop-killing radical fugitive would seem like a good start.”

  “Very good, Benny.” There was resignation in your father’s voice now. “Thanks a lot. You got it all right. Now go publish it.”

  “Mr. Grant.”

  “Ben, for God’s sake.”

  “Jim. I’m sorry. Jim. I’m giving tons of goodwill here. You have all the chance in the world to respond.”

  A pause, and a shift in his voice. “I appreciate that, Ben. I’ll tell you what. Come by my office, tomorrow afternoon. Say, four o’clock. And I’ll explain.”

  I looked at my watch. “I have a deadline this evening, Mr. Grant.”

  Now your dad’s voice shifted again, and I had a sense of what he was like in court. “Listen, if I’m in the paper tomorrow, don’t bother coming downstate. You want the story, miss your deadline.”

  The line went dead. I flipped my cigarette onto the ground and went pensively back to my office.

  Now, as you know, I got the Pulitzer in 2004, reporting on the fundamentalist revolution in Turkey before Turkey joined the war. I like to tell people that it was only the purest luck that had me in Istanbul in the first place—I’d been kicked out of Israel by the Jewish fundamentalists, and Turkey was the closest U.S. allied border.

  Apart from that, however, the single other greatest piece of luck in my life was what happened that Tuesday afternoon in June, when I went in to my office.

  I didn’t have any question about waiting to write my story until I found out what Jim Grant had in mind the following afternoon. Certainly I was going to wait. Why not?

  What I could do now, however, was see what else I could learn about Jim Grant. I could check with the American Bar Association. I could call friends in the Albany courthouse. I could run a PACER Legal search, and a Lexis, and look at past cases he’d been involved in.

  And, nearly as an afterthought, I could do a background search.

  Like most reporters, I had an investigator to call on.

  Unlike most reporters, mine was a friend—Bill Taylor, a private detective in Connecticut I’d met researching one of my first articles.

  I spent a good hour on the phone with Bill, catching up. Then another few minutes giving him the specifics of Jim Grant.

  Bill listened quietly. Then he said, “Okay, bubba. I’ll see what I can find. Page me Wednesday at twelve-hundred-thirty. I’m out of pocket till then.”

  And then, at last, it was time to check into the other office, where, it seemed to me, scotch and soda was the people’s choice.

  My reasoning was, essentially, homeopathic: treat like with like. Good scotch for the good, good work I’d done that day.

  And soda because the effervescence would exactly mimic the feeling of excitement growing in my stomach and chest.

  Date: June 8, 2006

  From: “Molly Sackler”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 8

  Should I have noticed something wrong when J came home early that day? It was all so normal, my love. You’d spent the morning at my house, waiting for Leo to wake up, playing on the lawn and swimming in the pool, you little beauty, slim-limbed and lithe in the chlorine blue. That your father should have come home early wasn’t exactly usual, not at that point when he was working hard, needing money. But it was not so strange this particular June afternoon, a summer day in the Catskills. Particularly given what he wanted to do, which was simply to go swimming up on the Katterskill with us.

  I remember that day so well. I remember how present J was with you, fully engaged, listening carefully and responding with a gentleness that for me, in fact, defined him at his very best. I remember watching his slim, muscled body, warm in the sun, and under its fine tangle of red hair as he lay on an elbow, his brown eyes focused totally on you.

  In retrospect, I realize the courage that it took, to be so present with you that day.

  As we left the river in his Subaru, I remember clouds sweeping in from the west, high up, casting fast shadows across the thick midsummer foliage. Driving up 23A to pick up some cheese at the goat farm under the shifting shadows from the sky. You visiting with the goats while your daddy and I bought the cheese, your body hitched up on the fence in shorts and a swimming suit, while the little beasts gathered to the fence, bleating for food, and a barn kitten rubbed against your foot.

  It was while we were there that J got a call from Benny, and then the tone of the day shifted again.

  I r
emember afterward, taking 28 south through the Ashoken Reservoir to Kerhonkson, your father winding down the little roads with his eye on the rearview mirror, then up the long private road, where we had dinner with Charlie Miles and Naomi Freundlich and their kids while the sky got ready to rain. While Naomi and I took a run up Haver Road, your daddy sat with Charlie, watching you and Hannah and Clara, intently peering into the little pond, hunting for frogs. I remember leaving and driving through the night, you asleep against me in the backseat, and the car warm with the heat of our bodies, and intimate, and the black night all around infinite, and safe, and the menace of distant storm.

  And I knew we were anything but safe, and your daddy knew it too. I could feel it, the sense of helplessness in him, a sense of lostness, and not just once but several times I found myself thinking of my own father. As if buried inside us for all these years was still the impulse, when things got bad enough, to call home. But there was no home to call to, and had not been for a great long time, and driving through that night with your father I think that we both, each in ourselves, felt the bitter and unheroic solitude of adulthood as we had never felt it before.

  Your father, your father. Your father pulled into my driveway and sent me up into my own house, watching while I tiredly climbed the stairs to begin my night’s vigil. Perhaps he longed to come with me, up to my bedroom; perhaps he told himself that that avenue of comfort, the last, was closed to him now too. Perhaps driving across to his own driveway, pulling in, and turning off the car’s lights, it was easier for him to think that I did not understand what he was about to do.

  For a long time, at the window of my bedroom, I watched him sitting there. Knowing, knowing, and still wishing it wasn’t true, and still knowing there was nothing, nothing I could do.

  You sleeping in the backseat.

  The storm approaching through the night.

  And then I watched him pull out of the driveway, headlights still off, and make his way slowly along the road, lit only by the moon, past my house and back to 32.

  And it was only then, as he got clear out of our neighborhood and onto the main road, that I saw his headlights turn on and accelerate out of sight to the north.

  Date: June 8, 2006

  From: “Daddy”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 9

  Oh, God, Isabel, that night. I drove north under the shifting sky, north and west, and didn’t stop until Watertown, where a one-story motel lay in a hollow of rolling hills.

  I remember the smell of curry in the office of the motel, a Hindi satellite broadcast sounding from a TV. I remember carrying you inside a little room, limp over my left shoulder, through the mosquitoes under the neon lights lighting the outside of the little rooms.

  Because I knew the thunder would wake you and scare you, I sat with you while the storm rolled in, watching your face in the dim light through the curtain on which big moths threw shadows, unwilling to leave. You slept on one cheek, your face composed in nonnegotiable gravity, but with a total lack of effort, a sleeping Buddha. And as always, at the sight of you sleeping I felt a regret that sat heavy in my belly, a regret that seared.

  What good is beauty when it never appears but as an adjunct of loss? What good is love when it is entirely powerless? I left the bedroom door open and went out onto the little concrete porch where under the motel’s eaves I sat, watching the curtain of rain. I closed my eyes and saw myself surfing a wave of flame, balanced on the heat itself. My stomach was flooded with the awareness of loss, past loss, imminent loss. I tried to tell myself that my perch in life was not nearly that precarious. I tried to tell myself that life has a way of righting itself. I tried to tell myself what I’ve always told myself: that my life was a story with a happy ending, and that the plot twist I was in now would only make that ending all the happier. I tried to let my mind melt into the thick tapestry of falling rain.

  God, I was scared. A paralyzing, debilitating fear that seemed, now, to stretch each second out to an unbearable length, an unendurable stretch of time to be traversed. Regret searing through me. Sharon Solarz, Julia’s lawsuit, Ben Schulberg. Everything I most feared was coming home, just when I needed a quiet, calm, obscure life in which I could, alone and unencumbered, try to help my fiendishly smart, precociously verbal daughter—the daughter of a drug addict—become a human being. No one knew the damage Julia had done, no one except me and Molly. Even you don’t know, Izzy. The night terrors, the phobias, the early childhood stammering—no one knew the enormity of the heart, the solitude, the patience that you needed, and no one knew how much progress you had made in the past two years.

  And now the whole wide world was conspiring to take away my chance to make you whole.

  I sat up nursing my anxiety, as hard as a bowling ball in my stomach, until midnight, while the rain came and passed. And finally, when I could stand it no more, I stepped out of my clothes and, stark naked, dropped into the motel pool.

  Here for a time I floated on the surface, staring up into the sky, where waves of clouds moved over a quilt of stars and a half moon was rising. I must have dozed, for through my body passed a memory of my father as a young man, swimming with me at Colgate Lake. For a time I felt my body as light as a boy’s, a boy’s in the strong and safe care of his father. Then, vividly, a recurrent dream came to me, and I watched myself walk into the woods and lift my infant daughter from where she lay on the ground. Then I came to myself: a middle-aged man with a dead father and the grief of a lost daughter in a black night.

  Back at the room where you slept, I sat on the porch again. A full cloud cover was over now, and a growing breeze made me shiver once or twice. I did not move, though. I sat, watching the darkness at the bottom of the night while the winds rose and the summer storm at last came in from the mountaintop, dumped its water on the river flats with its roaring complexity of tiny drops, and then rumbled away to the distance, leaving in its wake thin rivulets of water running toward the creek.

  And then it was light, and I must have slept in the deck chair, because you were standing next to me in your nightdress, your body still warm from sleep, your face artless in its awakening. And I noticed, as I did every morning, that no matter what kind of night I had had, or what kind of pain I was in, before you, before your reality, it seemed that all horrors were an illusion and that everything was going to be okay.

  But which was the illusion?

  No decision had been made, no understanding had been accomplished, no clarity achieved. But with the vision of your face, smoothed by sleep and softened in early light, I slowly, with saturnine unwillingness, acknowledged that what I had for so long feared was here.

  Bobby Montgomery and I, our little game of nuclear parity was at an end.

  As long as the threat I posed to him—my ability to ruin his chances of becoming ambassador to the Court of St. James by exposing his daughter’s years of drug abuse and trouble with the law—was balanced against the threat he posed to me, everything was stable.

  But now Sharon Solarz was going to trial, and somehow, somehow, your grandfather had gotten Ben Schulberg on the case and caused him to put Jim Grant’s name in the press. That changed the whole equation. Because Ben Schulberg, whether he knew it or not, was on the story of his career, a story that would be followed not just in Saugerties and Albany but by the New York Times, by 60 Minutes, by reporters like Douglas Frantz and producers like John Marks, and these remorselessly intelligent, infinitely energetic people would focus the same energies on me as they did on embezzlers, dictators, and murderers, and when they did, they would find out the truth.

  Watching you, with an unwillingness as big as the big blue Catskill sky, I began the long process of finding the words to describe, to a seven-year-old, the absolutely incomprehensible thing that I was about to do.

  Date: June 9, 2006

  From: “Benjamin Schulberg” nny@cusimanorganics.com>

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 10

  “Kid?” The voice in the telephone receiver, when I got to work on Wednesday morning, was hard to place—particularly through the fog of hangover: I had spent the evening at the Shandon Star the night before, and tested, not for the first time, Hemingway’s statement that a bottle of wine was the best dinner companion. Of course, the wine, in this case, was bar scotch and soda—at some point I dropped the soda—and dinner was sliced turkey and gravy on white bread from the Shandon Star’s steam table. Memory serves, I believe instant mashed potatoes had also entered into the picture. Nonetheless, Hemingway was not entirely unrelated to the evening, if only because now, this morning, I felt like shooting myself.

  “Yes?”

  “Billy Cusimano here. Have you been in touch with my lawyer?”

  I looked at my watch, which I had been avoiding in order not to know how late I was to work. It was ten. “Yesterday I was. I’m due to see him at four this afternoon.”

  “I see.” There was a silence.

  “What’s up, Mr. Cusimano?”

  There was real ambivalence in the man’s voice, but at last he answered. “He hasn’t shown up at my arraignment.”

  Foggily, I tried to figure that one out. “You’re in court?”

  “Christ, you should know. Remember, those fuckers had a bug in my Sea of Green? Caught Sharon like that?”

  “I thought you said Mr. Grant would have that thrown out of court?”

  Cusimano seemed a bit testy this morning. Perhaps he was hung over too. “First he has to show up in court. Then he gets it thrown out of court. That’s the way it works. You seen him, or not?”